


Dagni

by Lakritzwolf



Category: The Hobbit (Jackson Movies)
Genre: Other, Sibling Reunion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-06
Updated: 2015-03-06
Packaged: 2018-03-16 14:27:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,457
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3491735
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lakritzwolf/pseuds/Lakritzwolf
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She grew up as a refugee in the Grey Mountains after barely having survived Smaug destroying her home. When she hears that there have been other survivors she travels to Ered Luin to find, against all expectations, that her brothers are still alive.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dagni

**Author's Note:**

  * For [EllGaine](https://archiveofourown.org/users/EllGaine/gifts).



She was born a daughter. She had never touched a weapon. Her hands did not know the hilt of axe or sword. They knew needle and thread, they knew weaving and spinning and knitting. She did not know how to fight. She knew how to make jewellery and embroidery.   
She was not meant for war. She was meant to be someone’s precious, high-born wife. 

Had she been a son she would have been battle ready. Had she been a son, she would have been allowed to take up arms and help defend her home. But she had been a daughter, and she was helpless.

Helpless and forced to watch as the dragon slaughtered her kin.   
Defenceless and forced to run away as others died and bled and burned to stop him. 

She watched her father and brothers join those who tried to stop the dragon. She knew she would never see them again. Her mother watched them go, and she knew, too, that she would never see them again. She could not bear it. To this day she does not know if she can ever forgive her for running into her death because she could not be without her sons and husband, rather dying with them than living for her daughter.

Helpless, defenceless, orphaned and alone. But she did not want to die that day. And she didn’t.

She ran. Ran away from the main halls, into the narrow hallways leading down, where the beast could not follow her. Down where the underground river ran, she met with others, servants and inhabitants of the lower halls. Two dozen women and children huddled together in their fear.

For two days they could hear the dragon ravaging our home. For days, they survived on water and water alone, forced to listen as everything they had ever held dear was destroyed.

She couldn’t say how long they hid down there. But at one point, the mountain fell silent. The dragon had left or gone to sleep, they did not know which. But they could not stay down in the lightless caves without food.

Then a group of miners found them. They had heard their voices and came to our rescue; leading them to an airshaft of a long abandoned mine. It led outside, to air, sunshine, and desolation. 

Dragonfire had burned every living thing.

They reached the Grey Mountains, and from the thirty-one dwarrow who had left the mountain through that airshaft, only eighteen remained. Most of the children and some of the women had perished. They had to bury them in shallow graves dug in haste.

They were refugees. But they survived. 

She couldn’t remember ever having been so exhausted; so hungry, thirsty and tired, as she was when they had reached the gates of the stronghold. But she survived.

Her stepmother from the dreadful day on had been a washerwoman; she had done the laundry of her family. She showed her how to do the laundry herself. How to cook, to mend and how to make a living.  
When it is about survival, no one needs embroidery with finely spun thread of gold. 

Had she still been a lady of Erebor, she would have grown up in wealth and carelessness. Delicate her hands, and delicate the braiding of her hair. But delicate braiding does not help you survive. Delicate hands are useless for defence.

She picked up a sword. She was taught how to use it. She was no noble lady anymore, and times were hard. Who was to tell her no when she wanted a part in defending her new home, especially after she had been so helpless when the first one fell.

Never be helpless again. 

She knew she would never be like the warriors of old. She would never be a warrior like her father or her brothers. She had not learnt to handle weapons from the day she could walk. But she could defend myself, and others if need be. She learned how to take care of wounds and prepare a meal even when food was scarce. 

Eventually she could make her peace with her past. She had lost everything, but she had built herself anew. No wild warrior-princess like in the legends of yore, but a woman who could do what needs to be done. 

She was content.

Until the day she learned that there had been more survivors other than them that day. For years she hesitated to seek them out, hoping she might find someone she once knew, and dreading that she wouldn’t.

In the end, a few of them decided to brave the road once more and headed to the Blue Mountains. It was then, scores of years after Smaug, in the caverns of Ered Luin, that she learned that her brothers were still alive. 

Yet to this day, she did not reveal herself to them. They think her dead. And they remember her fondly. They remember a pretty young dwarrowdam who rode on their shoulders.   
Nothing in her speaks of that girl anymore; the sister they remember is dead, she died that day in the dragon’s flames. Would they be happy to find her again, even as she was now? A woman hardened by life and loss, bearing the marks of a bitter past? 

And here she sits, reflecting on her past as she smokes her pipe and drinks her ale. And she watches them, her brothers who have mourned her death decades ago, do the same. They smoke their pipes and drink their ale, and damn Mahal, she has looked too long. There he goes, standing up and he is still as tall as she remembers him.

He sits down at her table without so much as a by-your-leave and lifts one eyebrow. She can see that he bears the marks of loss and hardship, too; as well as those of many battles. His voice is deeper and rougher than she remembers but it is his voice, and her resolve is suddenly gone.

“Pardon me, lassie,” he says. “You’ve been watching us. And you seem familiar, have we met before?”  
She hates tears, but she cannot keep them in check. “Dwalin?”  
His eyebrows rise. “That’s my name, for sure. And yours?”  
“Dagni,” she says, and she can see the shock and the denial on his face. He does not believe her, he does not want to believe it.  
“Dagni,” he says, bringing his face under control. “I knew someone of that name once.” Then he looks over his shoulder at his brother. He joins them, and now she feels cornered. She gets out of her chair and drops her pipe.

She remembers her oldest brother as a grown warrior. Now he is old, his beard is white as snow. But it is him, undeniably so, and she realises that they are not denying either, but are searching for the same recognition. 

“Dagni,” Balin says, and his voice has not changed at all. “From where do you hail?”

She looks back and forth between the two. She has always felt safe with her brothers, but she looks at two weathered warriors that look like her brothers, given the time that has passed. But what has remained of the dwarves she once knew? Had they changed as much as she had?

“I grew up in the Grey Mountains,” she says, and she can see how they exchange a short glance of utter disappointment. Her heart begins to race. “But I was not born there,” she adds. They look at her again, raised eyebrows, tilted heads, questioning looks.

“I was born in the Lonely Mountain,” she says. “I was one of a group of survivors who escaped through the airshaft of an abandoned mine. We made it to the Grey Mountains.”  
“I never knew there had been other survivors,” Balin says, almost a whisper. “How many?”  
“Eighteen that made it,” she replies. “I was born a lady but that life lies behind me now as far as the Mountain of my birth.”

These two dwarves are strangers, and they are her brothers. She no longer knows what to believe.

“I am Dagni, daughter of Signi and of Fundin,” she finally says. “But the girl who was forced to flee her home no longer exists.  
Dwalin drops his hands. “Dagni?” His voice sounds strange, too high and too strained. “Dagni, is that really you?”  
“You would call me kitten when you let me ride your shoulders,” she says, and her voice sounds strange as well, even to herself.

And then her world spins, and she is buried in the greatest, warmest, most rib-cracking hug of her life, and for hours after that they are in tears and laugh at the same time.


End file.
